The Twin Souls of the Prince of Night
by UnknownNelson
Summary: Born with a soul from each mother, Shiba Tatsuya's life takes an entirely different turn at birth.
1. Chapter 1

_**(Prologue)**_

"Enter," called the soft, enticing voice of the Yotsuba Toshu, Yotsuba Maya. Her loyal butler, Hayama, quickly opened the door to allow the visitor entry into Maya's study, the deepest and most secure room of the maze-like Yotsuba mansion. In fact, the mansion was actually built to be a labyrinth, and when the Yotsuba bought it they removed parts of the outer sections to serve as open training grounds, resulting in a very confusing three-story building full of dead ends and abrupt floor changes. The study in question was placed underneath the eastern wing, and used to be a small wine cellar until it came into the hands of the Yotsuba. It still shared one characteristic of a wine cellar, and that was darkness. The moonlight came from a small window but only served to cast deeper shadows across the room.

The study door opened without a sound, oiled once a week by the dutiful Hayama, and in entered Yotsuba Tatsuya, officially Shiba Tatsuya, the son and heir of the Yotsuba name. His features were of no particular note, excepting for his eyes, the right of which being jet black, and the left appearing as though it was being drained of color, as the top of his iris was a light grey-white color. He wore a flexible gunmetal-grey suit, with a white shirt and a tie of the same color. Tatsuya, being a thin youth of the age of fourteen, easily slipped through the door when it was still halfway opened and bowed wordlessly to his mother.

"Ah, Tatsuya, thank you for coming on such short notice. So, are your cousins, the Kuroba family, treating you well?" came a hauntingly beautiful lilt from Maya's equally exquisite lips.

Tatsuya straightened his body and, without saying a word, nodded his head once. If anyone else had done this it would have been the height of disrespect, but Maya seemed not to mind.

"Well it's good to see so. Even if you are a guest, I was afraid that Mitsugu would isolate you from his children. Speaking of which, how are his children?" continued Maya, "Actually, I think I'll ask him at dinner tonight."

Tatsuya merely nodded his head again, showing no indication of how rare it was for even a family head to dine with the Yotsuba Toshu.

"Well then, shall we go." stated Maya, giving the order whilst rising from her throne-like chair. Hayama quietly opened the door, and Tatsuya followed her out.

* * *

 _ **(April 24th, 2078, Birth of Yotsuba Tatsuya)**_

Most births are full of pain and mother's cries, followed by the cries of a child who was forcefully ejected from the womb, despairing at the unfamiliar lights, sounds, and cold. For Yotsuba Tatsuya this was not the case. The woman who bore him was not one so weak as to fall into tears at a little pain. As a proud Yotsuba guardian she had been chosen to bear the child of Yotsuba Maya, from an egg sample that was cryogenically frozen before her others were lost. Immediately after the childbirth, she handed the yet-unnamed baby to her master, who held him aloft before the world, proudly and defiantly. Her butler, Hayama, clapped softly, the sound echoing throughout the room devoid of any but the three of them.

Tatsuya gazed quietly into her eyes, motionless, as Maya gazed back at him. It was then that she noticed his eyes. His right eye was jet black, but his left eye was a gradient shift between white and black, and the gradient moved. As the gradient lightened, Maya noted a fluctuation of pushions throughout the room, and as the black drained from her son's eye, the glow brightened. The black then once again flowed into his eye, returning it to a deep ebony, darker than a moonless cloudy night. As the color poured back into Tatsuya's eyes, the pushion fluctuations ebbed away into nothingness. It was at this moment that Maya knew she had created a very special child, and lost herself in joy and madness.

* * *

 _ **(Yotsuba Tatsuya, Age 7)**_

Seven-year-old Yotsuba Tatsuya sat quietly on a bench canopied with vines, reading a book. Because Tatsuya was a rather large child for his age, it was easy to mistake him for an eight or nine-year-old, making this seem like a rather normal image. Except that it was overcast at midnight, and Tatsuya was reading a college physics textbook.

After several more hours, Tatsuya finally closed the book and stood up, dusting off his purple plaid button-down shirt and black pants, looking at the moon as it peeked from a corner of a cloud, only for it to fade quickly like a dream, leaving only the sweet memory of its radiance. Tatsuya stretched to relieve his muscles of their soreness, walking quickly, but not rushing, through a slightly overgrown garden path before entering the small house where he currently lived. The color drained from his left eye, and it emitted a soft glow, like the first star of the night.

What actually happened is that one of Tatsuya's twin souls left his body, and entered the door to allow it to open itself. There are many different definitions for life, but the one recognized by Tatsuya was that to live, one must have a soul. A soul is not something that is used to go to the afterlife or preserve one's spirit or consciousness for all of eternity, but instead a method to efficiently convert energy into movement, and Tatsuya had one of his souls partially embody the hinges to the door. The hinges, being small, required only the smallest fraction of Tatsuya's souls, but changed the color of Tatsuya's eye entirely.

Eyes, in fact, are the window to the soul, or rather the gateway or mask of the soul would be a better analogy. The iris specifically is used to cover up and trap the soul within, and modern magic is actually just using energy from another dimension, accessed via the so called "magic calculation area" to form the mask of the soul into an image of said soul. Most human beings are unable to open the gateway to their souls because they would then be unable to keep said soul within them, and would cease to be life. However, because Tatsuya had multiple souls, one from his biological mother, and one from the woman who bore him in her womb, he was able to freely manipulate his spare soul and perform true magic: the giving of life, even if temporary, to otherwise inanimate objects. The capabilities of said objects were often very limited, to the point where the soul within it was able to dictate what it did. This soul, of course, belonged to Tatsuya, and therefore Tatsuya could command it as he pleased. This means that Tatsuya could control whatever he put his soul into, using the energy contained within its matter to manipulate it as he pleased.

The door closed behind Tatsuya, and he sent one last hopeful glance through the windowed wall of the mudroom for the moon, only to be disappointed and remove his shoes, the laces of which undid themselves from their pretzel knot and placing them under the polished wooden bench and entering the main room. The house Tatsuya lived in resembled a traditional hunting lodge, with deliberately crude furniture covered in lacquer, all made of homely oak wood. This was in fact built by a five year old Tatsuya, as he was given a tent, a week's worth of food, and four square kilometers of woods and told to survive there for six years, and Tatsuya has been doing a remarkable job. He was able to get books through delivery and terminal, and had been training his body and mind for the last year and a half, the first six months being time he used to adjust and build his home, as well as explore his territory. The decorations were all Tatsuya's personal preference, though is affinity for the night can be said to come from the Yotsuba blood that flowed through his veins.

Tatsuya entered his lodgings, and grabbed some venison jerky from his pantry before reclining on his couch like a partially curled pillbug, lifting his upper body to swallow before laying his head back down on the deep emerald green pillow while pulling up his terminal keyboard and typing away like a woodpecker digs for insects in a tree at whatever ideas had popped into his head.

Everything properly recorded, Tatsuya removed all sources of light from the room with a simple command, and put the keyboard away before putting his hands on the back of his head. His breathing softened to be barely perceptible, and he lost himself in the world of dreams.

* * *

 _ **Sorry about all of the similes and metaphors, I felt like being poetic. Please review, and I will see you all soon with an increased tempo in the next chapter. Also I'm sorry if the description of Tatsuya's powers was unclear, I had an idea in my head that kept changing on me so they will hopefully become more clear as I flesh the story out.**_


	2. Chapter 2

_**(Yotsuba Tatsuya, Age 12)**_

Tatsuya woke up as usual, at 0700 every day. He quickly got up, and spread his feet 50 centimeters apart before doing hamstring stretches, nearly touching his elbows to the ground. After a few seconds of this, he stood up and tied back his jet black hair, which reached behind his shoulders (living in a college town/hippieville, I only realized now that this is a notable feature to most people. Sorry for the potential inconsistencies.) into a high ponytail and sat back down again, grabbing his keyboard and checking his mail. Mostly, all the mail that Tatsuya received had to do with the various book orders he sends, as he receives a large package of them every second Monday morning. Mostly they were just confirmation emails.

Standing back up again, Tatsuya moved into the kitchen area, which was in fact the same room as his living area, separated by a bar style kitchen counter and sink which he used to do his cooking. He opened a cabinet and procured a wooden cup of considerable size, and filled it with water from the sink that had been collected by his gutters on the roof. When he first implemented this system, Tatsuya spent three days completely remodeling the roof, but because now he had pressurized water and he didn't have to walk three minutes to a river which meandered through his lands, he considered it to be worth the effort.

Tatsuya also pulled a wooden bowl of wild fruits out of the pantry. After rinsing his hands he consumed his meal in silence. Afterwards, Tatsuya rinsed the bowl and grabbed a pinch of salt, which he had found a small vein of, and poured it onto his tongue. He followed this up with the rest of the water in the cup.

Having consumed his breakfast, Tatsuya grabbed a black coat and walked out the door, locking it behind him. One would think that he would have a problem with bears, but he created, with the help of magic, a high solid stone wall around his residence, which he could jump over by making the ground into a sort of trampoline, but bears could not. He made sure to build his house overlooking a bluff, though, so that he could still tell by the sunrise that it was daytime.

Tatsuya softly jumped the wall, his eye slightly glowing, before setting off into the woods. First, he set off to check the various deer traps he had set. Being in Hokkaido, there was a vast population of deer to be had, especially because no one was allowed to hunt on or even to enter Tatsuya's lands except for the one Yotsuba delivery man that delivered his books and terminal. Even then he was only allowed to enter when Tatsuya specifically let him in, on an individual basis, and Tatsuya was with him until he left.

The first two traps were empty, but the third trap had a deer in it. Tatsuya had designed pitfall traps using salt licks as bait, and caught a deer once every week or so. He had even once caught a bear, which he used as a blanket during the cold winters. Tatsuya quickly used his magic to manipulate a sharp obsidian knife with a bone handle that he kept in his coat pocket, in a deerskin sheath. The knife cut the throat of the unfortunate deer in one quick motion, before wiping itself on nearby grass and returning to Tatsuya's hand.

Tatsuya then waited for the deer's soul to leave its body before replacing it with his own and lifting the carcass. He lifted the 40 kilogram deer onto his strong but thin shoulders and positioned the wound to the back of him. This was done so as not to have any blood removed from the carcass by gravity fall on Tatsuyas precious few clothes. When he returned home he would bleed the deer and remove the meat, before turning the hide into leather and burying the bones and entrails. After hanging the deer to bleed, Tatsuya left to check his other traps, which were empty.

Returning home, Tatsuya ate a small lunch of salted venison stew after dressing and preserving the deer he had killed earlier. Tatsuya's pantry now contained 60 kilograms of venison that could be consumed. After lunch, Tatsuya again left his house to practice the martial arts he had learned years ago. He had hung a wooden post from a tree and covered it with deer hides, anchoring the bottom to a stone weight with a periodically replaced vine rope. He used this target to practice kicking on, which can injure the knees and hips if done without one.

An hour of sweat later, Tatsuya returned indoors to grab a pair of clothing, which he brought along on the three minute journey to the river. He also brought a book on human anatomy, his newest subject of fascination.

Having reached the river, Tatsuya quickly stripped and entered the cold water. Without taking note of the low temperature of his bath, he quickly set about washing his arms, legs, torso, and finally hair. Afterwards, he retrieved his dirty clothes and washed those in the river too. This got them to be relatively clean, and Tatsuya would burn pine needles underneath them once he finished drying them to remove the scent of bodily odors. Because Tatsuya was only twelve, the amount of odor coming from him was mostly negligible, allowing him to bypass the difficult and painful process of using a washboard and nearly boiling water.

Hanging the wrung-out clothes on the limb of a tree, Tatsuya sat down on a nearby stump and shook his hands dry before pulling out his book while his limbs, torso, and hair did the same. Even though he only had a couple of minutes to read, he was able to process and understand twenty pages of the dense textbook, a feat which would cause most college students to weep at their comparative incompetence. That being said, it was a superhuman reading speed brought about by Tatsuya's absolute focus.

Finishing the chapter, Tatsuya used the surrounding air to quickly dry his hair and put on the alternate set of clothes, and his long jacket on top of that. These were all black to avoid staining. Tatsuya then burned some surrounding pine needles to scent his now dry clothing, causing them to smell faintly of pine resin before hanging them on his arm and setting off to return home.

* * *

 _ **(Same place, just change in pace)**_

Upon returning home, Tatsuya saw a black unmarked SUV parked in front of his house, and a stocky man wearing a black tuxedo and black sunglasses standing near the driver's side door. There was a noticeable bulge in the shape of a small firearm on the person's blazer, above the left lung. Immediately Tatsuya unsheathed and threw his knife, while simultaneously using magic to pull the man's gun through his bulletproof tuxedo and into Tatsuya's hand. The knife then stopped at the man's throat and Tatsuya stepped forward into the stranger's vision. The stranger slowly lifted his hands to head level.

"... Who?" was the question that Tatsuya asked. Before the stranger could answer, however, one of the doors to the SUV opened and out came a middle aged man wearing a maroon suit, with matching hair color. This prompted Tatsuya to aim the pistol, a 9mm black desert eagle at the new potential threat, while simultaneously raising and compacting some dirt over the man's hands to make him unable to use a CAD, as Tatsuya had seen an abnormal control of the person's psions as he came out of the car.

"Calm down… please." said the person in the maroon suit. "My name is Kuroba Mitsugu, and I was sent by Yotsuba Maya to retrieve you and bring you to my place of residence.

Tatsuya tilted his head and questioned "... Why should I… believe?" The man who called himself Kuroba Mitsugu nodded towards the interior of the car and said "In there is a document from Maya-sama in a code that I cannot read. She wishes you to have it."

Without taking his eyes off of either of the intruders, Tatsuya slowly retrieved the document, which was contained in a yellow legal envelope. He then retreated to a safe distance and opened it. Contained within the envelope was a single slip of paper which read, in a wingdings-like code, "Pack some things and go with this man. -Your mother, Maya." Upon reading this message, written in a code which he had only shared with his mother and Hayama, Tatsuya relaxed. He dropped control of the dirt, and recalled his knife before sheathing it. He also ejected the magazine and unchambered the bullet, catching it and replacing it in the magazine. However, he did not return the handgun, choosing to instead tuck it behind his waistband.

Wordlessly returning indoors, Tatsuya took his terminal and a couple of books which he hadn't read, and stuffed them into a deerskin bag. He then took a drink of water and ate some venison jerky in case he wasn't able to eat anything in the next couple of hours. He then left and jumped back over the fence, much to the surprise of the guard. Placing his deerskin bag over one shoulder, Tatsuya entered the backseat of the SUV, again, wordlessly.

"Let's try this again." said Mitsugu, who was waiting in the backseat. "My name is Kuroba Mitsugu. Until the Toshu says otherwise, I will be taking care of you." "... I am… Tatsuya." was the response that came. Tatsuya's voice had gone from just quiet like earlier to quiet and breathy, likely a result of his vocal cords having atrophied from disuse. Mitsugu noticed this, gave a wry smile, and left his guest to his own devices. Tatsuya pulled out a book and started reading.

* * *

 **I seem to have gotten all of the poetry out of my system. Also, I think I'm really bad at dark souls. It took me two hours to kill Vordt of the Boreal Valley, the second boss… gj me. Please review, and please point out any flaws that I may have in writing style or story flow. Even if it is the most toxic criticism ever, it's better that "great story" or whatnot. Just please try to be specific about what in particular you don't like, or think I could do better, because otherwise I can't fix it. Thanks for reading!**


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